The adoption of cloud computing is rapidly accelerating due to the benefits of speed, deployment, scalability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. A primary driver behind cloud adoption is the prevalence of web applications coupled with mobile devices. Now more than ever, the cloud is becoming more desirable and accessible as companies are increasingly deploying new applications with a cloud first, mobile first mentality to support faster time to market, more flexibility, and more reliability in comparison to traditional on-premise approaches.

As web applications and content start to play an increasingly important role in modern businesses, the user experience is becoming imperative. To have that competitive edge, companies must provide a highly compelling and immersive online experience that can be accessed on any device. A critical aspect of the user experience is performance. A high performance application is imperative, as it will drive increased conversions, customer retention, and revenue. The concept of delivering a quality user experience sounds simple enough, yet is still met with a number of challenges.

Traditional approaches to improving the user experience were born out of the PC era, during a time when desktop computers, wired network connections, and simple websites dominated the landscape. These solutions attempted to solve problems that existed on web servers, in the datacenter, and in the core infrastructure of the Internet.

Over the last few years, the Internet, the devices connecting to it, and the websites and applications delivered over it have changed so dramatically. These changes have created new challenges: overcoming the latency and congestion of wireless access, increasing use of dynamic data, and dodging a broader range of security threats. Legacy application delivery solutions such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that were designed on a centralized architecture are unable to cope with modern application development needs.

CDNs were originally developed over 15 years ago when websites were primarily static, with content being accessed over the wired, last mile network. The primary bottlenecks were latency and routing problems in the core of the bottleneck and the Internet backbone was much slower and less reliable than it is today. CDNs reduced the latency associated with static content traversing the Internet core and caching content closest to the end user. Caching, by definition, relies on relatively infrequent changes to content stored on the edge of the network. However, CDNs were not designed to address the new challenges of highly personalized, graphicallyrich, dynamic websites and applications accessed over wireless last mile networks.

Enter a new solution for a cloud centric landscape: automated, software-defined content delivery. The idea for Instart Logic was born from the mission to provide application delivery that's fast, secure and scalable to companies whose business depends on cloud application performance.

A radical new approach to application delivery, Instart Logic has a Software-Defined Application Delivery (SDAD) platform, which gives true end-to-end control of the content delivery path from client to cloud to origin. This enables dramatically new approaches to application performance, security, and analytics. With a software-based approach, Instart Logic decouples the hardware and network from the software used to deliver applications, a fundamental paradigm shift from the legacy hardware-centric content delivery approach. The notion of a network perimeter is disappearing and a new approach is needed for delivering applications no matter where they are in the world and what device they are being accessed by. In simple terms, it requires more than just putting traditional appliances in the cloud, but rather an entirely new approach that can handle the elastic needs of a modern day application and operate seamlessly from the underlying hardware.

Prior to forming Instart Logic, I worked at big data analytics company Aster Data (later acquired by Teradata Corporation) along with the other two members of the founding team: Hariharan Kolam and Raghu Venkat. With extensive backgrounds in solving tough problems in distributed systems, virtualization, static analysis and application performance, we were convinced that wecould radically change the paradigm of web application performance by building a technology that could make the entire Internet run faster.

A company rich in software expertise, machine learning, and computer science knowledge, Instart Logic's employees come from notable Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Citrix, Cisco, Akamai, Facebook, Qualcomm.Over a third of our global engineering team comprises of PhDs and the company has filed over 40 patents. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California with a growing presence in Bangalore, India, Instart Logic continues to push the boundaries on innovation.